Context Statement: Learning About an Education Context: A Community, a District, and a School
Overview
One of the major objectives of this class is for you deepen your understanding of American public education and improve your ability to critically explore and discuss information relevant to school performance and potential reform approaches. This type of knowledge might be useful for you in several ways, including understanding potential schools where you might consider teaching, understanding what types of data are available for schools, and choosing where you might want to live and raise a family.
For the next few weeks, we will be reading Jonathan Kozol's description of several public school systems across the country. During this assignment, we will investigate local schools, their districts, and their surrounding community to try to understand the conditions in public schools closer to home. In our "investigations," we will base our conclusions on facts that we can gather from various sources. To understand what might be happening "behind the scenes" within a school or district, you have to be able to formulate questions and seek out evidence that helps answer those questions. You must be able to examine relevant social, political, and institutional factors, and understand how these factors relate and how they interact to influence the nature of education in our schools. In the spirit of Kozol's work, our guiding question for our investigative work will be:
What contributions do charter schools make to the state's educational landscape?
Our Process
In past years, we have started our context reports by learning to use research tools to answer questions about our schools. This involved some explorations that are guided by Ms. Mona Niedbala in the URI Curriculum Materials Library as well as some investigations on our own to find data sources that could help us answers specific questions about our schools.
This year, we will build on this pattern but do some things differently. Last year, instead of just picking schools individiually, we focused as a class on just a few school districts: This year we will decide on our focus question and choose the schools that we examine together.
In the past, each student has created their own report. For the past two years, we we've written some of our context report sections in teams. This has worked pretty well, so we will repeat this again. This year, we will work in teams to investigate and report on the communities and the districts, and then work individually to write our school descriptions.
Our Products
For your final project, you will work in a team to develop a detailed support of one districts along with the communities that they each serve. These descriptions should be exhaustive and based on evidence. In addition to these descriptions that you develop together, you will also describe a school within your district individually. Your final report should be of a high enough quality to be published online. Given this goal, it is critical that each claim you make must be supported with evidence, that you cite your sources carefully, and that you avoid including personal opinion or a biased point of view.
We will use both a private and a public web space for our reports. You will initially post your report to our website URIteacherknowledge so that we can work together to refine our reports. A copy of your final pages will remain in URITK as a reference for the School of Education student teachers. In the cases where there is already a context report on URITK for your school, your work must substantially extend and improve what is already present. Depending on the quality of what is already there, you may have to submit a brief description of how you plan to extend your school's entry. If you choose to publish your report, then you will have a peer reviewer certify your report's readiness and then copy it over to our public wikispace, www.RISchools.wikispaces.com.
In the course of writing your description of your school and district, you should use APA format to cite your sources. We will install and learn to use a citation manager called Zotero to help you gather and manage citations for each piece of evidence you include in your report.
Key Deadlines
Reference the class schedule for the following due date for this project:
Milestone: Class Questions
Deadline: School District Selection
Deadline: Draft Context Statement posted on URIteacherknowledge
Deadline: Final Context Statement posted on URIteacherknowledge
Deadline: Final Context Statement published publicly
A Community, a District, and a School
Overview
One of the major objectives of this class is for you deepen your understanding of American public education and improve your ability to critically explore and discuss information relevant to school performance and potential reform approaches. This type of knowledge might be useful for you in several ways, including understanding potential schools where you might consider teaching, understanding what types of data are available for schools, and choosing where you might want to live and raise a family.For the next few weeks, we will be reading Jonathan Kozol's description of several public school systems across the country. During this assignment, we will investigate local schools, their districts, and their surrounding community to try to understand the conditions in public schools closer to home. In our "investigations," we will base our conclusions on facts that we can gather from various sources. To understand what might be happening "behind the scenes" within a school or district, you have to be able to formulate questions and seek out evidence that helps answer those questions. You must be able to examine relevant social, political, and institutional factors, and understand how these factors relate and how they interact to influence the nature of education in our schools. In the spirit of Kozol's work, our guiding question for our investigative work will be:
What contributions do charter schools make to the state's educational landscape?
Our Process
In past years, we have started our context reports by learning to use research tools to answer questions about our schools. This involved some explorations that are guided by Ms. Mona Niedbala in the URI Curriculum Materials Library as well as some investigations on our own to find data sources that could help us answers specific questions about our schools.
This year, we will build on this pattern but do some things differently. Last year, instead of just picking schools individiually, we focused as a class on just a few school districts: This year we will decide on our focus question and choose the schools that we examine together.
In the past, each student has created their own report. For the past two years, we we've written some of our context report sections in teams. This has worked pretty well, so we will repeat this again. This year, we will work in teams to investigate and report on the communities and the districts, and then work individually to write our school descriptions.
Our Products
For your final project, you will work in a team to develop a detailed support of one districts along with the communities that they each serve. These descriptions should be exhaustive and based on evidence. In addition to these descriptions that you develop together, you will also describe a school within your district individually. Your final report should be of a high enough quality to be published online. Given this goal, it is critical that each claim you make must be supported with evidence, that you cite your sources carefully, and that you avoid including personal opinion or a biased point of view.
We will use both a private and a public web space for our reports. You will initially post your report to our website URIteacherknowledge so that we can work together to refine our reports. A copy of your final pages will remain in URITK as a reference for the School of Education student teachers. In the cases where there is already a context report on URITK for your school, your work must substantially extend and improve what is already present. Depending on the quality of what is already there, you may have to submit a brief description of how you plan to extend your school's entry. If you choose to publish your report, then you will have a peer reviewer certify your report's readiness and then copy it over to our public wikispace, www.RISchools.wikispaces.com.
In the course of writing your description of your school and district, you should use APA format to cite your sources. We will install and learn to use a citation manager called Zotero to help you gather and manage citations for each piece of evidence you include in your report.
Key Deadlines
Reference the class schedule for the following due date for this project: